restoration at Threave

Case Study 5H

What is landscape restoration?

When humans began settling in specific areas rather than moving around to find resources, they engineered ecosystems for their own convenience. At small scales, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. But when ideas of “efficiency” emerged in the mid-1700s, mass production quickly followed - and that meant large areas of land were intensively used to do just one thing. This monocultural approach is antithetical to how nature thrives: through interconnected diversity. Landscape restoration is about bringing back that diversity.

As we’ve learned more about anthropogenic (human-caused) impacts on the climate, we have come to realise that all the intensive landscape engineering people did in the 1700-1900s wasn’t necessarily the right approach. Though it did increase agricultural yields, it also left us - and biodiversity - very vulnerable. Landscape restoration involves a very different approach to ecological management: one that focuses on what nature does best. Watch the videos below to learn about the goals and techniques behind a few landscape restoration projects in Scotland.

The Threave Landscape Restoration Project near Castle Douglas is trialling ecocentric land management techniques on 81 hectares of land that were intensively farmed in the 1900s. Their goals include a thriving woodland-wetland ecosystem able to naturally adapt to climate changes - and their main tools are Earth’s natural processes. Learn more about the project’s history, methods, and initial outcomes below.